This article is sponsored by Trane.
Improving the performance of commercial buildings is more important than ever. Shrinking budgets, limited staff resources and increasing sustainability and environmental goals are among the challenges that may play a role in the pressure to improve building performance. There are building energy management systems (BEMS) that can help address these challenges and deliver outcomes that matter to the business.
Trane Intelligent Services is a portfolio of BEMS solutions that provides data-driven analysis and expertise to help transform a building into an asset that positively impacts the bottom line through cost reduction, greater efficiency and ongoing improvement.
Determine Goals
Buildings are full of untapped potential, and they provide many sources of valuable data that can be used to help gain insight into the facility. With the knowledge and solutions to make the invisible data visible in a building, Trane works with an organization to assess building data and develop a plan to fit specific needs and budgets, using customer-defined key performance indicators (KPIs) to track performance and measure success.
The journey to achieve optimal building performance does not happen overnight. Goals and needs may shift as the building changes and technology evolves. Intelligent Services offers scalability, with technology and solutions that can be tailored to the organization’s budget or needs. Choosing a BEMS provider that acts as a partner throughout the process is important. A good partner not only helps identify goals and makes targeted recommendations, but also helps prioritize projects within the plan to ensure resources are directed toward the right things and can even offer implementation expertise to help complete identified projects.
Build a Clear Picture of Performance
With Intelligent Services solutions, a team of experienced Trane building professionals help optimize a building and provide a clear picture of performance. Understanding how the building is supposed to perform — and how it’s actually performing — is an important part of creating an energy baseline and prioritizing building needs.
Ongoing consultation and regular reports help identify inefficiencies and capture details about why and when a building is wasting energy, which provides insights on continuous improvement. Harnessing the array of data sources in a building helps in making more targeted decisions regarding building systems, with the ability to track and report on a range of meaningful KPIs.
Validate Results
Following up with execution of the plan and ongoing validation of results are equally important steps in implementing a BEMS solution. It’s important to have specific measurements in place to determine success. Understanding the important KPIs for a specific building, and how the benefits of those improvements accumulate to impact the bottom line, helps provide valid feedback and demonstrate the return on investment of the executed plan.
Validation of the results — and demonstrating that project improvements are having an impact — can be critical in gaining support for additional resources for continued improvements.
Sustain the Gains
Look for solutions that go beyond technology or software, and a BEMS provider that becomes a partner that provides continued support, analysis and expertise. This helps sustain the savings and uncover opportunities for even more improvements. A BEMS provider that can act as an extension to the building operations team is ideal.
With Intelligent Services, the end result is a complete building energy management solution tailored to specific business needs that delivers improved building performance without sacrificing occupant comfort, reduced operating costs and sustainable outcomes.
Learn more about Intelligent Services.
Matt Gates is the Director of Intelligent Services Offers for Trane, which includes a portfolio of Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) solutions. In addition, Gates leads the efforts to commercialize new and differentiated Intelligent Services offers for North America.
Over the course of Matt's 11 years with Ingersoll Rand, he has held the positions of vice president of energy management services – global services, vice president of contracting solutions – global services, direct sales leader and contracting solutions leader for Trane’s central territory.
